You're In The Right Place

Dear Reader,

Welcome to The Rhett-irement Project! This is my epistolary experiment in social media. It's a newsletter for people who already know who I am. If you missed it when you subscribed, I wrote a brief essay about why social media is designed to be terrible and my motivation for creating this experiment on the about page.

My goal is to shelter this newsletter and the website from the general cacophony of the Internet. The humble email turns out to be the most accessible way to communicate on the internet. Emails can go anywhere in the world and they don't pass through social media algorithms. These newsletters arrive at your inbox. You receive them using the computers and programs that work best for you. The blog makes these letters available on the web. Anyone can read them, but I have put tags on all the web pages that ask the search engines not to index the pages. The experiment isn't meant to be a walled garden. It's more like a magic noodle shop that's hard to find unless you've been there before.

How Does This Work?

We'll figure that out as we go. You can hit reply on the newsletter if you want to comment directly to me. The newsletter's reply-to email address will end up in my inbox. If you're subscribed, you can leave comments on the blog version of the newsletter. You might do that if you want to write something that other subscribers (and others on the internet) can see if they visit the post. It's a little inconvenient since you have to log into the website to do it.

I will occasionally post summaries of what is going on in my life. I want to practice writing, so you can expect occasional longer form essays. Language is a representation of human thought. Writing is a tool that helps me understand what I think about things. The newsletter serves as a motivational tool for me to write something of a memoir.

Feel free to ignore any post that's boring. I'll try to make it clear early on in any post what the topic is so you can bail at your earliest convenience. There won't be a quiz at the end. If you have a topic you think is a good subject for an essay, let me know. If I'm also interested in what I think about it, I might write it.

Thank You For Subscribing

Thank you to everyone who has subscribed. I appreciate your interest in this experiment. If you decide you want to write a newsletter, I'm at least one subscriber ready to give you their email address. If the experiment is successful, one of my longer form essays will cover how I set this up and ways that others could do something similar.